Educational Science

It's bad enough when a parasite latches on to your body to suck you dry. But when it starts eavesdropping on your communications, enough already. That's what the parasitic dodder vine does. It consumes water and nutrients from a host plant and, scientists have just discovered, it taps into the...

The Strange Role of Sex in Hillary's Failed Run

Hillary Rodham Clinton came close, but failed. Beyond the wrong turns pointed out by strategists, her political path this year was rooted in social biases, some scholars say. Gender stereotypes, for instance, put Clinton in a no-win situation, said Caroline Keating, a psychologist at Colgate University in New York. When...

Humans can see into the future, says a cognitive scientist. It's nothing like the alleged predictive powers of Nostradamus, but we do get a glimpse of events one-tenth of a second before they occur. And the mechanism behind that can also explain why we are tricked by optical illusions. Researcher...

Life Endures 120,000 Years Under Ice

Being tiny has its advantages, and a newly discovered microbe in Greenland has exploited this fully. The bacterium survived more than 120,000 years beneath the ice where inhospitable conditions reach new lows. Most organisms constantly deal with trade-offs, such as some hot-desert residents that take advantage of sunshine yet must...

Now What? Californians to Rehearse 'The Big One'

Some Southern Californians are said to have stampeded yesterday as they tried to evacuate a high-rise during the 5.4-magnitude quake outside Los Angeles. That is exactly what Margaret Vinci didn't want them to do, yesterday or during future earthquakes, especially The Big One that scientists predict will come any time...

New Math Tricks: Knitting and Crocheting

Coral reefs can be crocheted. The atmosphere can be knit. And a stop sign can be folded into a pair of pants. Welcome to the intersection of math and handicraft. Unexpectedly, handicraft in general, and yarn work in particular, has started to help provide answers to a wide range of...

New Fossils Suggest Ancient Cat-sized Reptiles in Antarctica

Cat-sized reptiles once roamed what is now the icebox of Antarctica, snuggling up in burrows and peeping above ground to snag plant roots and insects. The evidence for this scenario comes from preserved burrow casts discovered in the Transantarctic Mountains, which extend 3,000 miles (4,800 km) across the polar continent...

How Stress and Diet Cause Heart Attacks

Word of Tim Russert's death at 58 shocked many Americans today, and behind the grief came nagging questions about heart attacks, like the one that struck the newsman, and anxiety about how they kill. Russert's death came in a week when the government reported U.S. life expectancy had risen to...

San Andreas Fault Longer Than Thought

As if the San Andreas Fault weren't long and menacing enough, newly found mud pots and mud volcanoes now suggest it extends another 18 miles, going under the Salton Sea and beyond, in the desert southeast of Palm Springs. The extension is probably inactive. U.S. Geological Survey researchers David K....

How Early Experimenters Developed the Bow & Arrow

Technology doesn't just advance on its own. Somebody has to try new things, experiment, innovate, and test it all again and again. The same was true 1,500 years ago when the bow and arrow was introduced to North America, a new study suggests. University of Missouri archaeologists have discovered that...